More headlines: Hillary Clinton on Health Care

Health care reform is key to a “new politics of meaning”

[In 1993, in her first speech following her father’s funeral], Hillary grappled with questions raised by medical technology: When does life start? When does life end? Who makes those decisions? Moving into policy questions: How do we get rid of
regulation & bureaucracy, and substitute instead human caring, concern & love? She cast health care reform as critical to a broader search for a “new politics of meaning” in a society she said had failed to confront technological change & spiritual decay

Source: Hillary’s Choice by Gail Sheehy, p.234
Dec 9, 1999

Universal coverage, cost containment, & managed competition

In 1993, Hillary’s Health Care Task Force was running into major obstacles. The first one was self-inflicted. Given Hillary’s penchant for secrecy, doctors were shut out of the task force’s deliberations, as were lobbyists and journalists. Behind closed
doors, Hillary began working toward her vision: universal coverage, cost containment, more primary care physicians, managed competition, and global budgeting. In effect, Hillary was attempting to reform a system larger than the entire economy of Italy.

Source: Hillary’s Choice by Gail Sheehy, p.235
Dec 9, 1999

Work toward affordable universal health care

There are 41 million people without health insurance. Who will take care of these people in the future? How will we pay for their care? How will we pay for the extra costs that come when someone is not treated for a chronic disease or turned away from
the emergency room? The job of health care reform cannot be done when access to care depends on skin color or the neighborhood they live in or the amount of money in their wallet. Let’s continue to work toward universal affordable, quality health care.

Source: Harvard Medical School Address
Jun 4, 1998

Still scarred from ‘94 failure, but ready for universal care

I tried to achieve universal health care back in ‘93 or ‘94, and I still have the scars from that experience. You know, I take it as a perverse form of flattery, actually, that if they weren’t worried, they would not be so vitriolic in their criticism
of me.

Because I believe that the country is ready for change. I believe America is ready now for universal health care. It is ready to clean up the government after the corruption and the cronyism of the Bush years.

Proposed Natl Health Board to oversee employee cooperatives

Hillary’s 1993 plan for managed competition would band employers and employees into huge cooperatives with the bargaining power to challenge the insurance industry. It would force doctors, hospitals, and insurers to form partnerships in order to
compete in offering the highest-quality health care at the lowest cost. The new competitive health marketplace would be overseen by a National Health Board.

Source: Hillary’s Choice by Gail Sheehy, p.240-241
Dec 9, 1999

Medicare is biased against nursing home alternatives

The problem for Americans in the Medicare program is there is no support for alternatives to nursing home care. We want to provide long-term care options, so that families will not be forced to put their family members in nursing homes.

Providing a home health aide, giving some respite to the full-time caretaker of an Alzheimer’s patient, that is all much cheaper than putting the person in a nursing home. Let’s enable older people to live with dignity.

Stupid to spend on administration rather than on doctoring

We have the finest doctors and hospitals in the world. We spend money on paperwork, we spend money on bureaucracy, that we shouldn’t have to spend.
What the president’s plan is designed to do is to put doctors back in charge of the system, where they can be making the decisions, not insurance company executives or government, which is the way it is too often today.

Guaranteed benefits & focus on prevention

I know no way to attempt what we are doing; to achieve universal coverage, to guarantee a comprehensive benefits package, to begin to simplify a system that has become much too cumbersome, bureaucratic, and overregulated, to attempt to begin to
achieve savings and eliminate inefficiencies, but at the same time to enhance quality, to guarantee choice.

We should build on the employer system. The employers contribute, those who work contribute, and all of us are thus paying our fair share.

Americans want system with quality & choice

We have looked at every other system in the world. We have tried to talk to every expert whom we can find to describe how any other country tries to provide health care. We have concluded that what is needed is an American solution
for an American problem by creating an American health care system that works for America. Two of the principals that underlie that American solution are quality and choice.